This blog deals with issues pertaining to natural dignity and worth that all humanity deserves under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It deals with topics pertinent to Christian living and faith.

“Our once great western Christian civilization is dying. If this matters to followers of Jesus Christ, then we must set aside our denominational differences and work together to strengthen the things that remain and reclaim what has been lost. Evangelicals and Catholics must stand together to re-establish that former Christian culture and moral consensus. We have the numbers and the organization but the question is this: Do we have the will to win this present spiritual battle for Jesus Christ against secularism? Will we prayerfully and cooperatively work toward a new Christian spiritual revival ― or will we choose to hunker down in our churches and denominationalisms and watch everything sink into the spiritual and moral abyss of a New Dark Age?” - Mark Davis Pickup

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Helen Keller was deaf and blind from early childhood, yet she became one of the great humanitarians of the 20th Century. When news of her death in 1968 came over the radio, I remember my father said, "There goes a great person." I was fifteen years old at the time and too self-absorbed to care or understand. Only much later, in my own disability, did I begin to understand what my father meant. Helen Keller wrote:"When one door of happiness closes another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door we do not see the one that has opened for us."Have you or a loved-one acquired a disability or incurable

condition? Do you think your happiness and the world you knew are lost because of this? Yes, it may appear that way; the door to your former life may have closed with you on the wrong side of it. As Helen Heller said -- and I can attest to the truth of her words -- another door opens but it requires that we look for it.The new door that opens may take you in a different direction involving new realities. The old self is gone but a new self can emerge if you are open to it. That new self may be as vital and vibrant as the old self; but you must be open to exploring possibilities that may involve a change in self-identity and self-image and how you fit into the world.

Understand that how the world relates to you will likely change. How you relate to the world is up to you. There will be temptation to become bitter but resist it and turn to Christ for understanding. He has allowed this for a reason. He may deliver you from your anguish or abide with you through it. What seems like a catastrophe to you may actually be intended to mature your spiritual character and prepare you for the world to come. Be open to God's leading.Again, Helen Keller wrote these insightful words:"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience and trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."

Me speaking against euthanasia
& for life with dignity
to a Michigan audience

And again, I can attest to the wisdom of her words. I have been able to serve God more from my wheelchair than I ever did able-bodied. It was when I finally surrendered my will to Him that He could could use me for His purposes rather than mine.If you are facing disability or chronic illness, do not give up on life. God has a plan for you. Seek it. Pray. Find your purpose in accordance with the Bible. Go through the new door opened to you to find a world of possibilities. God loves you.Mark(I am available to speak to community groups, churches, or legislators about Life Issues. CONTACT: HumanLifeMatters@shaw.ca )[Click on image below or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxBhG-EBbIM ]

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The HumanLifeMatters profile above says I write about "Christian perspectives on suffering, end of life issues, disability and other issues important to Christian living." So why do I often present issues pertaining to the arts -- and music in particular? It is simply because music has been a companion and friend throughout more than three decades of suffering associated with my chronic illness and disability. Music can come close to giving expression to the deepest human grief, fears and uncertainties. Certain music is felt more than heard. It is spiritual.

For example, the movie The Mission was released in 1986, two years after I was diagnosed with aggressive multiple sclerosis. It was at a terrible time when the full weight and horror of serious neurological disease was been realized. My world seemed to be falling apart! Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe broke my heart because it lent a voice to my emotional and spiritual pain. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QeDOT2Fqb0The inexpressible loneliness and heartache I experienced during weeks, months and even years convalescing found expression in Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcflwUYYoXk

Beethoven's 9th Symphony (written at the height of his creative prowess yet in a state of near-total deafness) called me to look above my circumstances and realize that I still had something to contribute to the world despite my disability -- perhaps even because of it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SgGxww_LVcMusic is intensely spiritual to me and has been since early childhood. God often speaks to me through music. -- Mark[Click image below or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXjn6srhAlY for "Ave Verum Corpus" (Mozart), Choir of King's College, Cambridge, U.K.]

Monday, September 22, 2014

(CRDP). Unfortunately it is an
inferior yet pervasive document that requires nations to give up their
sovereignty in too many areas pertaining to citizens with disabilities.

Perhaps
the CRDP has a place in countries with poor human rights records, but that is
not the United States of America. The United States has a long history ― far
superior to the United Nations ― of protecting and improving the lives of
people with disabilities within America and abroad. As a North American
advocate for Life and disability issues, I have wondered why the United States
would sign it. To what advantage? The United States should be teaching the
United Nations about disability rights.

For example, the Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA) sets an exceptional standard for real disability inclusion. It is an extraordinary
law that other countries can aspire to imitate, including my country of Canada.For years I advocated that my government
create a “Canadians with Disabilities Act” that mirrored the ADA. A federal statute like this combined with
other federal, provincial and territorial disability legislation and policies is
the best way to address needs, protections, and inclusion of disabled
populations. A blanket international document like the CRPD is too clumsy and
generic to be effective or precise. Unfortunately Canada ratified it in 2010.

Now we have to toe the U.N. line, dutifully submitting our
progress reports ― like a child handing in school assignments for approval. I do not
want America to make the same mistake! As I stated earlier, not only is the
United Nations treaty an inferior and flawed document, it requires ratifying
nations to give up too much of their own sovereignty regarding their citizens with
disabilities. Nations that ratify the CRDP are legally obligated to implement
the treaty’s global legal standards in “civil, political, economic and social
spheres”: In other words, EVERY sphere of life. The CRDP legal standard is
overseen by the ‘benevolent’ tyranny of a UN bureaucratic committee; it will
interpret the treaty and tell ratifying nations what to do. Is this really what
America wants?!

The CRDP is carried along with an air of contemptuous

superiority
and condescension for member states. Article 4 says that “States Parties
undertake to ensure and promote the full realization of all human rights and
fundamental freedoms for all persons with disabilities without discrimination
of any kind on the basis of disability.” The United States does not need to be
told this by the U.N.! America is the
greatest defender of human rights and ‘fundamental freedoms’ in the world.

Once the United States is under the thumb of UN
bureaucrats behind the CRDP they can/will declare the U.S. must “take all
appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing
laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against
persons with disabilities.” (Article 4.1.b)Who will decide what constitutes disability discrimination and which
American laws, regulations customs and practices must be modified or abolished?

A CRDP compliance committee of ‘experts’ will tell America what she must do to adhere
to the treaty’s standards. Once in the CRDP snare, the U.S. cannot re-negotiate
the treaty’s provision that will extend its tentacles even down to family
levels (see Article 8.1.a). It’s too pervasive!

The United States’
Congress will soon be asked to ratify the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities. I implore America not to sign it. Your greatness is found within you by ordinary people doing extraordinary things, not imposed from outside bureaucrats. (A version of this post appeared on 21 September 2014 in the U.S. Congress blog the hill.com for lawmakers and policy professionals, (http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/218254-us-should-not-sign-un-disability-convention).

Friday, September 19, 2014

If I was able to start my life over, and if I was not disabled by multiple sclerosis, I think I would study cello. I love the cello's depth, mournful elegance and versatility. Here for you listening pleasure is Serbian-Russian cellist Xena Jankovic playing Beethoven's Cello Concerto, No. 5 in D major, Movement 1. Click on image or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNT_EOA8ksY

God may not be dead, but considering the imago Dei in philosophical discourse and public policy certainly is. Not only that, but the rational reasons for acknowledging the exceptional dignity of humans are wrongly denigrated as merely reflecting our religious past in which rigid moralism supposedly trumped reason.

Today’s dominant cultural voices argue that an individual’s moral

worth should be predicated upon his or her individual capacities of the moment. This view is most acutely expressed in bioethics, the field that wields tremendous influence over health-care public policies and in the ethical protocols of medicine. The potential that denying human dignity has to oppress, exploit, harvest, and kill the weakest and most vulnerable among us hangs in the air like malodorous evidence of a ruptured sewer line. In 2010, bioethicist Alasdair Cochrane clearly identified the ominous stakes:

If all individual human beings possess dignity, then they should not be viewed simply as resources that we can treat however we please. To take an example, then, it may be that we could achieve rapid and significant progress in medical science if we were to conduct wide-ranging medical experiments on groups of human beings. However, because human beings have dignity, so it is argued, this means that they possess a particular quality that grounds certain moral obligations and rights.

Even so, Cochrane wants to “purge dignity from bioethics” and judge individual “moral status” based on “the characteristics that warrant” a finding of “moral worth.”He’s not alone. In recent years, prominent bioethicists have proposed various moral status formulas to justify allowing “after-birth abortion” (otherwise known as infanticide), non-voluntary euthanasia of Alzheimer’s patients, and the use of profoundly disabled humans in dangerous medical experiments—just to name a few of the policy proposals that would obliterate our inalienable right to life. Outside of religious bioethics advocacy—which holds virtually no sway in the field—there has been scarce intellectual pushback against undignified bioethics. That is why I was heartened to read a just-published article in the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics that self-consciously stands against the “dignity deniers.” In “Dignity and the Ownership of Body Parts,” Oxford law professor Charles Foster defines our dignity as “objective human flourishing”:

Our main concern should be not abstract human thriving but the thriving of a particular human being. It is her humanization that should be the object of ethical discussion. . . . All of which boils down to the proposition that human dignity is objective thriving in the biological, societal, geographical, and other circumstances in which the individual finds herself. (emphasis mine)

In other words, the profoundly disabled human being and the

athlete each possess intrinsic dignity and, hence, must be treated in ways that recognize their best respective potential to thrive. Many bioethicists, in direct contrast, want to distinguish between the athlete and the profoundly disabled person based on their subjective belief that the robust individual has a higher quality of life. Such relativist thinking has already seeped into public policies, such as health-care rationing in the U.K., widely espoused for adoption.

Most impressively, Foster defends the dignity of permanently unconscious people, currently the prime targets for being stripped of equal moral status in utilitarian bioethical advocacy:

Is there any sense at all in which she can be said to be thriving? Yes, and two points can be made in support of this conclusion. First, her story (which in many ways is her) continues. The story is the necessary substrate for any ethical considerations that concern her. And second, there are good stories and bad stories, and it is better for her (a betterness accurately described in terms of thriving) for her story to be a good one. That is why we rightly say that it would offend her dignity were her body to be used by medical students to practice rectal and vaginal examinations.

Foster also gets into a point relevant to the Terri Schiavo case:

There are the interests of her family and friends. The patient might be incapable of appreciating her relationships, but that does not mean that she does not have relationships, or that the appreciation of those relationships is not an important part of the thriving interests of others. Going to see her each day might be the only thing that keeps her parents going.

Foster answers the dignity deniers’ objection that part of a good life is altruism—so why not, as has frequently been proposed in bioethics, harvest the unconscious patient’s organs?

Everyone, in fact, has a dignity interest vested in this particular patient. The criminal recognizes that society as a whole is damaged by, for instance, a murder. This is not merely or mainly because, if murder goes unpunished, murders will proliferate and the risk of each one of us being murdered rises. More important is what the fact of the unpunished murder says about the zeitgeist—about the ethical water in which we all have to swim. A society that tolerates murder is toxic, and the toxicity affects the ability of us all to thrive.

The moral heft of the last point—that denying dignity adversely

impacts the zeitgeist—also is relevant to other lethal matters such

as euthanasia and abortion. Foster somewhat dilutes his clarion call for dignity by proposing a complicated formula for its implementation. But that’s a quibble. His is a rare voice in secular bioethics pushing back against those who would objectify the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Good. We need all the help we can get in the Alamo. Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant for the Patients Rights Council.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Saint Peter Claver

“To do the will of God, man must despise his own; the more he dies to himself, the more he will live to God.

- St. Peter Claver

Saint Peter Claver (1580-1654) was known as the "Apostle to the Negro slaves." He was a priest in Cartagena which was a port that served the lucrative and brutal slave trade. He would enter ships as they drew near the shore to feed and care for their human cargo and defend them against their oppressors. His self-denial for the sake of black slaves was remarkable. Not only did he minister to them upon arrival in Cartagena but cared for them once on plantations and advocated to their owners kindness and fairness. During Peter Claver's lifetime he baptised more than 300,000 black slaves into the Christian faith, and sought to end the slave trade. He died in 1654 but his spiritual legacy continues to this day. Yesterday was the feast of Saint Peter Claver, Patron Saint of Slaves.

"I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The faith I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2.20)

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Wesley J. Smith is considered one of America's top bioethical thinkers. I agree with that assessment. For many years he has been warning America, and the world, about the dangers of assisted suicide and euthanasia to the seriously ill and severely disabled. His warnings are coming true just as he predicted in his writings, speeches and books like FORCED EXIT: THE SLIPPERY SLOPE FROM ASSISTED SUICIDE TO LEGALIZED MURDER, first published in 1997 and revised in 2003. Former United States Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop said this about Wesley's FORCED EXIT:

C. Everett Koop

"Society will rue the day it permits doctors to be killers as well as healers. Wesley J. Smith offers a compelling argument legalizing assisted suicide and clearly explains the devastating effects it will have on an unwary public. Smith has done us all a great service with this important primer."Dr. Chris Simpson, the new president of the Canadian Medical Association, should have taken FORCED EXIT under advisement before making his odious comments that doctor assisted death can be appropriate after other options are exhausted. (See my previous blog.)

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are erroneously presented as a liberator for the terminally/incurable ill and disabled. In fact, euthanasia and assisted suicide devalue our lives. We see this in language, such as calling people vegetables. It's as derogatory as calling blacks the "N" word. In fact, I remember hearing that someone predicted my degenerative multiple sclerosis would leave me a vegetable. (I'm still waiting for my grey hair to turn to a leafy top.) On September 2nd 2014, Wesley J. Smith wrote about the term "vegetable" used to describe profoundly disabled or comatose people in an article for the National Review. See "Taking pride in V-word "Unrepentant Bigotry"" http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/386861/taking-pride-v-word-unrepentant-bigotry-wesley-j-smithLet's give respect and dignity to everybody, even to profoundly disabled or dying people. Calling them names or killing them is not respect.Mark

Dr. Simpson's frightening comments hardly inspire confidence in me; I've been incurably ill for more than 30 years and disabled with the degenerative disease of multiple sclerosis. I can only hope that if I'm ever in a position where I can't speak for myself the presiding physician won't be one of the doctors Simpson mentioned. They may look at me and rightfully conclude I will never be normal and a burden on the health care system. I may have insufficient "quality of life" according to whatever utilitarian definition the presiding doctor decides to use. (God help me if Canada's Supreme court rules in favour of assisted suicide next month, or a future government decriminalizes assisted suicide and euthanasia.)Wesley J. Smith is one of North America's top bioethical thinkers.